[Return to How Can We Move All Students Towards High Standards?]"External standards change the student-teacher relationship," write researchers Douglas J. MacIver and David A. Reuman. "Because [individual] teachers can raise or lower requirements at their discretion, students -- especially those who feel overchallenged -- expend great effort trying to 'wear the teacher down' and negotiate a lessening of demands." This battle of requirements can be defused, the authors propose, "by applying external standards-setting and performance assessment, which would allow each teacher to function more like a coach." A coach "seldom has to fight the battle of requirements with his or her players" because players must perform at levels determined not by the coach, but by the prowess of other players. "Similarly, one reason that advanced students work more and complain less in AP classes...[is that] students know that the AP test is coming.... In fact, the teacher is doing the students a favor by pushing them, and the students realize this."
"Giving Their Best: Grading and Recognition
Practices That Motivate Students to Work Hard,"
American Educator, American
Federation of Teachers, Winter 1993-94.
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Teachers at the Accelerated Learning Laboratory (ALL) School rely less on textbooks and more on projects, so that their K-8 students learn to solve problems, integrate knowledge in core disciplines, and apply academic skills to the real world. In one interdisciplinary project, students in grades 3-5 simulated a 10,000-mile bicycle trip across Africa. They learned about the geography of Africa through telephone conversations with adventurers who had actually made the trip, and they created a scale map of the continent. Students learned to calculate time, rate, and distance -- and to read odometers and plot changes on a map -- while taking turns covering the relative distances in five-minute intervals on stationary bicycles.
Implementing Schoolwide Projects: An Idea Book, U.S. Department of Education, March 1994.
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Studying the American Revolution means more than just reading about it at Fullerton Union High School in Fullerton, California. Students form groups -- the Rebels, Loyalists, Indians, French, British, Blacks. They debate the causes of the Revolutionary War, play the roles of delegates at a convention, and construct their own constitution. Then they e-mail their proposals to the teacher, who merges and distributes the ideas for use in debate. The program, "Restructuring Social Science Via Progressive Technology," seems to work. Participating students earned higher test scores than their peers in traditional U.S. history courses.
From OERI Bulletin, Spring/Summer 1993
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"In Pinellas County, Florida...several schools are now closing classes early one afternoon a week -- to give teacher teams a solid chunk of uninterrupted time for in-depth cooperative planning. This radical departure from normal scheduling enjoys widespread community support -- because the change was made with community needs very much in mind. The Pinellas effort reflects those needs. Kids can stay on-site at school, in a special extended time child care program. That's the sort of school- community cooperation we...need to nurture all across the United States."
Keith Geiger, President of the National Education Association.
From NEA Today, November 1994.
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"Inclusion" is not just a buzzword or theory at Hawthorne Elementary School. This school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is able to include children with significant needs in regular classrooms because of three ingredients, according to third grade teacher Julie Ashworth: vision, training, and support. Parents, teachers, administrators, and students share a vision of "how inclusion can work." Teachers receive training in curriculum adaptation and modification for individual students, and students receive ongoing disability awareness training. Teachers are supported by a team that includes a speech and language therapist, a special education teacher, and a part-time integration specialist. "This team approach," says Ashworth, "is essential to making inclusion work."
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Each summer in Iowa, some 250 teachers create a five-day lesson plan for science, which they pilot test in their own classrooms that fall. But that's just the beginning of the Iowa Chautauqua Program. Teachers then spend a long weekend together discussing the performance of their pilot units. Over the winter, they develop and use a longer unit involving at least 20 days of instruction. In the spring they meet again over a long weekend to plan more extensive changes in school programs and teaching strategies. Throughout this process, teachers receive on-going support -- from central staff, lead teachers, scientists, and fellow participants -- through a newsletter, special memoranda, monthly telephone contacts, and classroom visits.
U.S. Department of Education, 1993
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"Parents are everywhere, helping students in halls and classrooms" at Elm Street Elementary School, says kindergarten teacher Nancy Royal. It's no accident. This Newnan, Georgia, school reaches out to parents in many ways, and early. When a baby is born, a teacher or parent volunteer goes to the hospital to deliver a "welcome letter" and give the mother a packet of information on parenting, infant development, community resources, and more. For parents of 2- to 5-year-olds, teachers created a video series on how parents can promote language, math, and motor skills. Teachers go to local job sites each month to conduct "effective parenting" workshops and provide individual consultations for employees. So well received have these workshops been that the school district plans to extend them throughout Coweta County Schools.
U.S. Department of Education, 1994
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